When was Windows installed?

For different reason, you might want to know when Windows installed.

Luckily you can find this information other places then checking out the date on certain system files that was created/modified and stamped at the same time as when you installed Windows. The file date stamp method does not in calculate that files change this information during upgrades etc. during the lifecycle of the installation 

In registry, you have a Key to help you with this information.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\InstallDate

Sleeping with Hyper-V

NO, I do not have a sick fetish (at last not one including Hyper-V). But I do alot of demoing on my laptop and love to use Hyper-V for that.

This means that I cannot use an ordinary Windows 7 client installation, we have to wait for Windows 8 for Hyper-V to be supported in the client operatin system.

I have been using Windows Server as my laptop OS for quite some time now and the only thing I missed was the possibility to use the "Sleep" feature (not that big deal when using SSD disk when starting, but the shutdown are slow because of the saving of running VM's)

 

So I found a solution sometime ago.

Windows 8 - Getting the "old" start menu back

Using a touch device the new metro interface will be a clear improvement. And the idea behinde replacing the old "Start Menu" with the "Start Sceen" are logical, because the "Start Menu" is not "finger friendly" on a touch device. But what the heck are it doing on the server version and why can't I make the start button act like it did before on my laptop without touch screen???

It's only a developer preview yet so I can forgive alot of things in this version, but reading the MSDN blog post "Evolving the start menu" makes it look like it might stay this way (even tough, I think it will have to be changed by populare demand)

Luckily there is a workaround for this!

Show hidden hidden devices in device manager

Back in the "old" days there was a registry setting to show all hidden devices in device manager

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment]

Just add "DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES" as a REG_SZ (String Value) with valuve 1

You have to use this to show devices that was not shown even after turning the "View - Show Hidden Devices" on.

So no, its not a typo in the title, its to show hidden hidden devices

Yesterday I got a great tips, that makes it posible to do the same thing with out addning registry setings.

How to use it can be found at this Microsoft articel here